It's a hot summer of 1959. Two lads were ready to head to Saint-Tropez with their motorcycle and a tent. Twenty something years old and with the camera in their hands, their trip had only one goal: to take a picture of Brigitte Bardot. Her movie «Et Dieu… créa la femme» («And God Created Woman») was shown in Swiss movie theatres at the end of the Fifties and the myth of sex symbol BB was already born. It was more likely to meet a star back then and as the two friends from Zurich were driving on a small road in the south of France, a Citroën 2CV came their way - at the wheel the lovely Bardot!
Later, when the object of desire sunbathes in a small boat with her boyfriend, the young photographers hide in the reeds, shoot some first photos of her and tried to sneak up on her while swimming on a air mattresses with the camera in a plastic bag. But Brigitte Bardot taught them a lesson they won't forget: she almost ran her boat over them. Swinging Sixties - wasn't a big deal. One of the two young men is the photographer Niklaus Stauss.
Niklaus Stauss has been taking photos since his teenage years. One of his first photo shows a rainy street at night. The photo is precisely listed in his archive as «Slide film no. 19, 146th image, taken on September 15, 1952». This kind of archiving has never changed. To this day he keeps accurate records of all of his photographs, which have already passed the one and a half million mark.
The biography of Niklaus Stauss is colorful and lively. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich in the 1950s and was a window dresser at Jelmoli - the best place for this profession at that time. He traveled around the world again and again, worked as a graphic artist, took lessons in expressionist dance, realized a special issue of the youth magazine CLOU on the subject «Dance» and opened a photo studio and an advertising agency. Niklaus Stauss has been working as a freelance photographer for the legendary Keystone Swiss press agency since the 1950s.
Stauss photographed Jimmy Hendrix in 1967 in the Hallenstadion in Zurich - he didn't even know who Hendrix was. He photographed Josef Beuys many times, in 1981 with suitcase in the Kunsthaus Zurich. In 1991, Stauss captures the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg in front of one of his collages - the photo became iconic. In Cannes, he captures an unknown beauty while descending from a jetty - a bit lost, but incredibly sexy - whilst the other photographers, still up on the deck, are looking in the wrong direction and missing this magic moment.
The photographs of Niklaus Stauss are invaluable contemporary witnesses. They show great personalities, but above all, they show people - at a respectable distance, yet very close.
© 2008, excerpt presented from Dorothea Strauss at the solo exhibition «Die Bugwelle der Bardot» (Bardot's bow wave) in the Gallery Nicola von Senger.
© 1951, photo by Hans-Ueli Blöchliger, Keystone SDA
